b e h n d i n g

so to be a good writer youre supposed to write every day, to make it a habit, just something you do like ea ting or sleeping.  it should be a natural act, not like forcing a smile for someone you dont like or know.  it should be like breathing, right?  im asking the invisible writer to whom this is written.  but if stream of consciousness isnt your style how do you translate this free form practice into writing proper?  how do you develop techniques of word choice or structure if you simply spew out whatever comes to mind?  rhetorical questions are a defense mechanism what do they accomplish, theres another rhetorical question.

today i attended a web du bois lecture at harvard.  the speaker was gayatri spivak and i hardly understood a full sentence she spoke.  throwing around the big words like candy from a pinata, the kind of candy that cracks your teeth if youre not careful.  the title of the talk was du bois and the general strike but i never did find out what the general strike was.  all i know was it happened in 1905 and im not even positively sure that thats true.  she spoke like she had some syndrome where she couldnt stop elongating her sentences until she changed the subject altogether.  she had notes but she just kept riffing, maybe it nerves but shes going to be 68 in 3 months so obviously it was not her first time lecturing to a room of influential academics and myself.  the great thing was she was wearing leg warmers and sneakers at the podium b/c she was late coming in for the lecture, having missed the first train she was supposed to take.  and her hairstyle was similar to skip gates’, close-cropped revealing a small well-formed head.  i cant accurately describe her talk, i began an attempt but fell into a rut a half-sentence in.  i did like what she said about du bois being a counterintuitive thinker the same as kant and frederick douglass and how we cant really expect to use reason to understand him or get the most out of his teachings.  she said she hoped we all dream at night b/c thats when we escape the totalitarian regime of reason, that incurable hangover from the enlightenment.  also there was good brie during the reception, which put me in a forgiving mood.

i have been reading on the road to decompress after finishing portrait of a lady.  its entertaining but not edifying. thats not a complaint, its not like everything i read must teach me something but i dont identify with the beat generation mode of life i have the baggage of an immigrant and bourgeois past so sue me if i dont want to frolic with my pants down and eat apple pie and ice cream at gas stations and rest stops across the country.  im almost done with the book thank goodness because im a serious person and wont apologize for that.  im not saying the book is trivial, just that it doesnt concern me.

i need to blog about things, not just ideas or whims.  my mind needs concrete objects to hold onto, to prevent it from turning everything into one big romantic, fantastical mess.  today’s thing is the candle in my bedroom.  a couple weeks ago it dawned on me that i am no longer banned from having lit candles in my room as we were at college.  to celebrate my newly realized freedom, i bought a pack of seasonal candles and a small cracked glass holder and a purple lighter.  now i come home from work and one of the first things i do is light the candle and turn off the light.  it came in handy tonight when the power went out just as i was coming back from the shower.  armed with candlelight, i was able to don my pajamas, take out my contacts, and perform my pre-bedtime routine without missing a beat.  and by then, the power was back on but i was already tucked into bed finishing up this entry.

It’s hard to be jaded about snow.  I stepped outside with a friend this afternoon and we both stopped short at the sight of the years first snowfall.  The flakes were stunning — their lively whiteness accentuated by a still, grey background, which was beautiful in its own right.  Is it unfair that they’ve prematurely ousted the foliage from the spotlight, muting the colors that on some level constitute autumn itself?  Google or bing autumn and I guarantee you will see lots of red, orange, and yellow in the images that pop up (I did it just to make sure).  But no white.  When I think about it, I can’t really see foliage and snowflakes in the same picture, coherently, though that doesn’t necessarily mean they clash.  It just means that the combination doesn’t fit into a stereotype of either season, and that I need to stop thinking of seasons in stereotypes.

I was in the car with dad and mom and two of their good friends (they go way back). We were on our way to a Chinese restaurant for dim sum and on the way, I thought about beauty and permanence and the relationship between them. I think the moving panorama of leaves changing colors (movement layered on movement) inspired me. I remember thinking that this autumn, and by autumn I mean the pattern, timing, the manner in which the foliage unfolds, this autumn is unique and moreover, will always be unique — I can say with reasonable certainty that the same autumn never occurs twice.  Although, they are all similarly impermanent.

More than once, a person in the car commented on how beautiful it was outside and how Massachusetts (mah-sang in Cantonese) was one of the best places to watch the leaves change colors. I don’t think it crossed their minds that the leaves were dying or already dead. I wondered if beauty and permanence are inversely related – if things are more beautiful the less permanent they are. This is not in fact entirely true, but there is still a relationship there, I reckoned. Perhaps it is that the more impermanent a thing, the more urgently its beauty be recognized for what it is, labeled beautiful. Such is one possible way that permanence, as reflected or redefined through urgency, affects the perception of beauty. I do also think that of all the places I have been so far, green leaves die most beautifully in Massachusetts.

what if instead of finding our purpose in life, we seek to create it?  we talk about discovering life’s grand plan for us like it’s a missing shoe when it might not even exist.  whether you believe that plan is supernaturally ordained or an organic phenomenon, aren’t you taught to reify the concept, to internalize that it actually exists and lies within your grasp?  what if purpose is just an inflated balloon that bursts and reveals its nothing but air-ness at the prick of a needle?  i’m frustrated with myself for envisioning a notion of a higher plane for living, this supposed calling for my life, without seriously questioning the supposition that it in fact exists.  It could very well be one of Christianity’s biggest shams.

So, it’s officially a go in Boston.  I start working October 1st, which doesn’t leave me much time to make the move.  Even though I’ve been expecting word, it felt sudden, unanticipated.  There’s an interesting relation between the expectation of an event and its fulfillment.  It’s the loss of continuity in the moment the event unfolds, in which expectation is annihilated (the connotations of brute violence and utter destruction are intentional) by the very thing it foresaw.  It’s a jarring transition the mind need make in that instant, from being in control to relinquishing it.  Less like a transition, more like a sharp, 90 degree turn.  And to think that all this drama unfolds under the radar, subservient to the significance we attribute to the event in itself.

I found this old post, so I’m posting it for the sake of its livelihood.  And I mean to do as my title suggests.  I really think this bout with vocabulary has been a healthy and edifying mental boot camp.  We’ll see how long this flurry of motivation lasts.

gerontocracy – n. government ruled by old people

misogamy – n. hatred of marriage

While typing the definition for malinger, I accidentally spelled duty “doody.”  I think these vocab cram sessions are getting to me.

Yesterday morning I happened to catch a glimpse of the sun’s sluggish but graceful ascent above the masts and lines of the Atlantic City harbor.  The minutes passed by slowly, I think for two reasons: the placidity of the scene and my sleepless exhaustion.  My ears were simultaneously tuned to an amusing symphony of sounds rising steadily like smoke from the ten quiescent bodies surrounding me in the hotel room.  Throaty, rhythmic snores at various octaves, the trill of light gurgling, the suspense-driving teeth grinding, and the staccato fart that unexpectedly pierced the morning air.  The juxtaposition of sight and sound at that moment was odd, but it worked.  Such moments do end, indeed this one yielded to the back of my eyelids not fifteen minutes after it started (when I perceived its existence), but really, why how can one expect such treasured moments to last forever, to extend ad infinitum?  I think the best we can do is try to preserve the truth of the moment by rejecting sentimental fancies or romantic whims we may wish to tack on after the fact (one of the bad bourgeois habits I am often guilty of), and then hope they return to us like boomerangs in memory form.  I’m reading a book delves into the notion of eternal return, and I feel like this thought is somehow related to or brought about by that.

In the film version of V for Vendetta, you might recall that Natalie Portman’s character Evey is secretly imprisoned by V in order to expunge her fears of the government.  He later justifies the staged imprisonment and mistreatment in quoteworthy terms, telling her “only when you have no fear are you free.”  During this period, Evey is spurred on by the notes she receives from the prisoner next door, one Valerie, whose life unfolds on the series of toilet paper sheets slipped between the cracks of the prison wall they shared.  Valerie wasn’t writing specifically to Evey; she just wanted to tell her story to someone, anyone, before she died.  I believe this is a fundamental human desire, to share ourselves, one that is so fundamental that on some level it doesn’t even matter who we are sharing ourselves with.  I believe this blog is part of me trying to share myself.  I don’t know who reads it, but I have to believe that at least one person does, and if that is the case, then this blog will sustain me.  In an ideal world, we share our lives with people who matter.  In a world above ideals, they partake of that journey along the way.  For Valerie, whose world was stripped with her freedom to love, it didn’t matter who was reading on the other side.  A blog, arguably all blogs, are attempts to share ourselves with the outside (of our bodies) world.

While teaching English in Hong Kong, I was often struck by the limitations of my students’ vocabulary.  Binary terms such as good/bad and sad/happy dominated our discussions and they expressed much frustration with their inability to precisely express anything outside of or in between those markers, words I view as just short of meaningless.  I would read 30 papers, all of which theorized that a poem‘s main purpose was to convey the sadness of death.  I am by no means mocking them, as I can easily recall my own days of second-language study and how pathetically limited my vocab was, how stifling it was to resort to the same handful of descriptors even when none of them really communicated what I was thinking, feeling like the best I could do was approximate, always hitting around the nail rather than whacking it squarely on the head. Each day I study for the GRE I am reminded that words are not just a vehicle for knowledge — how knowledge is communicated — they themselves are knowledge, both convey and constitute content.  In other words, the ability to express knowledge is knowledge, just as the inability to do so is a form of ignorance.  I openly concede that memorizing definitions is no way to spend the dwindling days of summer, but have found comfort in the fact that this seemingly mundane activity has provided me with more stimulation than boredom, more edification than inconvenience.  I only wish the same could be said of my sentiments toward my preparations for the quantitative section of the test.

sextant – n. navigation tool that determines latitude and longitude

sinecure – n. well-paying office job or office that requires little or no work

somniloquy – n. the act of talking in ones sleep

hirsute – adj. covered in hair

lilliputian – adj. extremely small

factotum – n. a handyman

doggerel – n. poor verse (as in poetry)

maverick – n. sarah palin via john mccain

Is it bad that when I saw the words paean the first thing that came to mind was paella?  YES.  I remember a pastor offhandedly mentioning in a sermon once that he believed people spent too much time thinking about food and that it was an injurious phenomenon, spiritually speaking, because it obstructed the full-fledged pursuit of God.  I also remember taking that remark very personally, so it must have set off an deep-seated feeling or belief in me.  Perhaps it was something like the feeling you get when someone talks smack about a person you love and says he or she is “bad” for you.  But I am forced to admit there may have been an element of truth in what he said, which is also probably part of why I found it unpleasant.

What I like about Barrons Test Prep (and what distinguishes it from the rest) is the effort made to inform rather than instruct.  Nuggets of historical and scientific information permeate the prep books and smart, interesting sentences help to keep me alert and engaged.  Once in awhile I will even look up words in the definition or explanation of the actual word I am studying, a sign to me that I am 1) stupid and 2) using the right book for me.

I noted to some people that I really enjoy studying vocabulary so much it is almost obscene to watch.  I realized today one reason why I delight so much in it is that I am revising — refining — much of what I took for granted as fact.  For example, I did not know the word poseur, as in someone who pretends to impress, was spelled like so.  I have especially found that many of the “definitions” of words in my head are actually more like tag-a-long connotations or cultural associations than precise, literal definitions.  That in itself has been a very valuable realization and am unabashedly pleased with myself for the grace with which I have accepted a temporary demotion in intelligence.